Virtual Bookkeeper Services

[Jim Garrett]

I'm a relative newby to REI having bought my first property January 2018. I've now completed 5 deals and have 14 rental units across 5 properties. I'm seeking a virtual bookkeeper to take over doing the mundane repetitive bookkeeping tasks that are bogging me down, like bank and credit card account reconciliations, transaction entries, financial statements and sales tax reports. I have been using Quickbooks to run various businesses for more than 20 years and currently am using Quickbooks Pro 2017 desktop. It's critical to me that I be able to have access to my books whenever I want, so I want any virtual service to have the ability to export the data to my Quickbooks desktop program. I've looked into BackOffice and Quickbooks Live who both claim the ability to do that. Does anyone have experience with either of them or other similar services? I appreciate any insights you can share.

Jim

[Jacob Sampson]

I have also been looking into a virtual bookkeeper.  My plan is to get a virtual desktop and install QB on it.  That way I can get to it at anytime and so can my bookkeeper then you don't need to pass exports around.  You could also just do a cloud hosted version of QB with the same benefit.  You and your bookkeeper are interacting with the same QB database.  The downside of the hosted version (and the reason I am still looking at a local install) is the reporting functionality is a little more limited than the full install.  At least it was the last time I looked into it.